The official first day of the event! You could notice the excitement during breakfast. All our classes will be at the Faculty of Civil and Industrial Engineering of Sapienza, University of Rome. It is located far from the main campus but it is right beside the Colosseum! It is a 17 minute walk from the hostel and we could appreciate some beautiful places along the way.
The event begun with the opening remarks from one of the organization chair Dr. Vincenzo Gatulli. During these three weeks we will have 40 lectures in the topics of Structural Dynamics, Structural Control, Smart Structure Technology, and Structural Health Monitoring. We will have a technical visit to the city of L'Aquila where we will see applications of smart structure technology. We are a total of 87 students from different nationalities and different backgrounds. There is a group student competition based on two experiments that will be executed during the first week. In addition, there are several social events that we can attend and on July 18 - 21 we can attend the international workshop ANCRiSST 2019, where students and professors will be showing some of their research about smart structures technology.
Later we had our first lecture about vibration analysis, identification and control. Dr. Vincenzo Gatulli and Dr. Daniele Zonta taught about basic concepts of system identification, modeling and structural dynamics because we are going to use these concepts all summer school.
During lunch break, we were recommended to buy something from the university store (Lo spaccio) and go sit in from of the Colosseum. My roommate Callum and I got some sandwiches by pointing at them because we had no idea how to pronounce things, but all of them looked delicious. Then we headed to the Colosseum that was only 5 minutes away and the views are just fascinating.
In the afternoon we had two classes with Dr. Bill Spencer and he talked about types of sensors and how do they work, collection of digital data and basics about digital signal processing.
At the end of the day, Dr. Francesco Romeo explained the student competition. We will be divided in 10 teams of 8 or 9 members each, and we have to prepare a 15 min presentation for the end of the summer school about the results of two projects. The first one is about structural identification and monitoring of a pedestrian bridge, and the second is damage identification and health monitoring of a small scale steel frame.
Today I also met my third roommate Artur, he is a colleague of my other roommate Callum and for simplicity I am just going to say he is from Germany, his ancestry is very complex. We went out for some pasta and saw the famous Spanish steps.
